No bobsled pilot has ever won three golds in a row. Kaillie Humphries can be the first — and she has a great chance

The top story

No bobsled pilot has ever won three golds in a row. Five men, across two-man and four-man competitions, have repeated as the Olympic champion. But no one has ever won three times in a row.

Kaillie Humphries can be the first, and she has a great chance. She led the World Cup overall standings this season, in early races with Melissa Lotholz pushing and later with Phylicia George, the Canadian Olympic sprinter turned brakeman.

Humphries won her gold medals in 2010 and 2014 with Heather Moyse behind her. And while Moyse is back on the team after returning to the program this season, it looks like George will be the one to partner with Humphries for the shot at that third straight gold medal.

The whole Canadian bobsled program has become a dominant force in the world this season, possibly pointing toward a large haul of medals in a sport generally dominated by the Germans.

Canadian men’s sleds have only won two golds in Olympic history: Vic Emery in four-man in 1964 and Pierre Lueders in two-man in 1998.

But Canadian drivers Justin Kripps and Chris Spring finished first and third, respectively, in the World Cup two-man standings this season after finishing ninth and 13th in 2016-17. Kripps finished no worse than fourth in any of eight events and had a win, three seconds and a third. Spring had a win and a second and was in the top seven in seven of the eight races. They will battle with German Francesco Friedrich, the World Cup overall runner-up, and Nico Walther, who each had two event victories.

In four-man, German sleds occupied the top three spots in the World Cup standings, but Kripps and Spring were fourth and sixth, respectively, after placing 10th and 14th last season. Kripps had two second-place finishes and three fourth-place finishes, while Spring finished third twice and fifth twice. They have a puncher’s chance at a medal in this event, too.

Venue: Olympic Sliding Centre

Dates: Feb. 10-24.

Clean up in Aisle 3: Canadian skeleton racer Jane Channell earned some notoriety in February 2015 at a race in Igls, Austria. A worker had been sweeping snow off the track with a push broom and was a little late getting off the track — and forgot something in the haste.

“Luckily it was only at the start of the groove, so I was maybe only going 30, 35 maybe 40 kilometres an hour,” Channell told Postmedia in June. “I had loaded on my sled and I looked up, it wasn’t there, looked down to re-adjust and looked up and it was there.

“It was just kind of, ‘Oh my goodness, what do I do?’ … The big bristle came up and swiped my neck it came down across my back and luckily it bounced behind me. I can’t imagine if it went in front of me what I would have done.”

The fast and fury-ice: Bobsleigh racers have to combine speed and power to succeed, and the heft of their muscle mass works with gravity to make the sled go faster.

“I work out a lot like our Olympic sprinters. I share a coach with Andre De Grasse,” Humphries told Postmedia last year. “We do a lot of sprinting, very, very similar stuff, we just only do it for 40 metres. Our reps are not nearly as long and we just get more of them in a shorter distance, focusing on the explosive side. All of our warmups and physical and technical aspect of sprinting is the same as the Olympic-level athletes.

“And then we do a lot of Olympic-level lifting as well … So a lot of our workouts are pretty much: take an Olympic lifter and an Olympic sprinter and put them together. We want to be as big, as strong and as fast as we can possibly be. We’ve got a sled that weighs 170 kilos and you’re trying to move it and get it up to 40 kilometres an hour in five seconds.”

For brakeman Jesse Lumsden, who played six years in the CFL before switching to bobsleigh, the training regimens are “very similar in terms of the strength and speed components of it.”

“You don’t have to worry about as much cardio with bobsleigh, don’t have to worry about the agility aspect of football when it comes to bobsleigh, it’s very linear training. But the application of power and speed is very, very similar.”

Most likely to win gold: The bobsledders, without doubt. It would be an upset if one of the women’s skeleton racers — Channell, Elisabeth Vathje and Mirela Rahvena — were to claim gold, but each has the ability to reach the podium. Vathje has three World Cup victories in her four seasons on the senior team and she finished third overall on the circuit this season. Rahvena has a World Cup win from January 2017 and five podiums since joining the senior team at the end of 2016. She was third overall in 2016-17. Channell has three World Cup podiums finishes in this Olympic cycle and was third in the overall standings in 2015-16.

Seeking for a matched set: Lascelles Brown, at the age of 43, has a chance for a third Olympic medal, after earning bronze in 2010 in four-man and silver in two-man in 2006. He raced in Spring’s four-man sled in St. Moritz on Jan. 14 when they finished third, but he’s been selected to race with No. 3 driver Nick Poloniato more often than not since December. So getting that gold medal to complete the trifecta may be difficult.

Having their best decade ever: Sliding sports, like many winter sports, derived great benefit from the facilities built for the 1988 Calgary Olympics. The kids drawn to those sports have populated the sliding teams ever since.

Sam Edney, the luger who is contemplating the end of a 16-year run after being a Calgary legacy athlete, said: “I’ve seen this program do a full 180 from a team that was very low funded and pinching pennies to try to make it World Cups around the world to fight for top 30 and World Cup qualifiers to see us now, every week, in and out, contending for World Cup medals. It’s something we can be really proud of.”

Best explanation of the difference between two-man and four-man bobsleigh: “Two-man is like rally-car racing, you and one other guy, and four-man is like the party bus. And I like the party bus.” — Lumsden

Best rule change: In the fall of 2014, bobsleigh changed the language of its rules to consider four-man sleds gender-neutral. That allowed Humphries and Elana Meyers Taylor of the U.S. to drive sleds in a North American Cup race in Park City, Utah that November with three men in the sled with them. Humphries finished sixth and Meyers Taylor was seventh.

In January 2016 in Lake Placid, N.Y., Humphries, Cynthia Appiah, Genevieve Thibault and Lotholz raced as an all-female team in a World Cup four-man event. They finished last in the 17-sled field, somewhat disappointing for the fiercely competitive Humphries.

“To be the first one is cool, but at the end of the day, I’m not doing it to be the first one,” Humphries was quoted by AP. “I’m doing it because it challenges myself to be a better pilot, to have something else to look forward to, something fun.”

Feel the rush: It’s not easy to explain the feeling of barrelling down an inclined tube of ice at speeds that would get you pulled over on a Canadian highway. But a couple of the athletes took a pretty good stab at it.

“I love the sound of the sled as it accelerates as you feel yourself rise higher and higher on each corner, the pressure and forces of each corner,” Edney said. “One thing I can describe is just the sound — it’s a sound of speed, but it’s also a sound of almost this quiet that is really unique to when you have a really good run and it just feels like everything is happening really smooth and effortlessly.”

“At the start of a race, if you can imagine the butterflies you get before any big event, the sound of the crowd roaring for you, the cowbells ringing,” Channell said. “And then when you’re on the block to go, you kind of only hear your breath, you only hear your heartbeat, because your helmet is so tight to your ears.

“Once you start running, you just kind of forget all the sounds and you’re focused on the step, and the step that you hear is the spikes digging into the ice. But then as soon as you load on your sled, it’s something special where everything else just kind of blacks out … and you hear the wind running past your helmet and the ice under your runners and it’s this moment of bliss when you’re actually going down the track, regardless of how fast you’re going.”

Hoping the precedent means something: Edney was 23rd in the World Cup standings this season, a steep decline from his fourth-place finish in 2016-17. But he’s had success on the track in Pyeongchang, finishing third in the World Cup race there on Feb. 19, 2017, and second in the Nations Cup race two days earlier.

“The track and I had a good connection right away,” he said. “I feel like there’s a couple tough sections — the crux of the track is right in the middle, corner nine — and the way I approached the corner worked really well for me. The feeling I had was a feeling of effortlessness. It was a really unique experience for me, especially going to a brand-new track that the entire world has very limited runs on.

“If I can improve my start, which is going to be a big aspect to gaining some speed in the top section, I know I’ve got that bottom section dialled and I can feel really good about that.”

Accidents happen off the track, too: Many of the athletes we talked to have been lucky with their equipment, but there’s always one story. “I’ve actually had my sled dropped, or something happened to it in transit,” Vathje said. “It took a big chunk out of the fibreglass … I’ve had runners go missing. They’re about $750 a pair and they lost five sets of them. So that’s a little bit stressful. It just kind of adds to the glamour of the job.”

Trading in that fourth-place medal: Canada’s lugers — Alex Gough, Edney, Justin Snith and Tristan Walker — finished fourth in the team relay in Sochi by a tenth of a second. Individually Gough was fourth against the other women; Edney was fifth and Snith and Walker were fifth against the the other doubles sleds. But Edney was 0.149 seconds behind the bronze medallists from Latvia, which made up the largest part of the deficit, erasing the half-second advantage Gough had given Canada in her run.

“Yeah, that was a tough one … It’s fuelled this past three years, this next Olympic cycle.” Edney said. “It’s definitely been the motivating factor for not only myself but my teammates.

“When I think back to it, there’s a lot I can learn from it. We went in as a heavy favourite to contend for a medal. One thing we’ve noticed is that the competition has tightened up. What we thought was once a very possible medal is going to be a very tough medal in the team relay. I think we’ve just realized as a team that we need to have our strategy much more tight, we need to make sure that each individual sled is having the best possible run that we can have.”

Canada finished third overall in six relay events this season and had second-place finishes in Innsbruck and Calgary. The Latvians, again, will be trying to edge them off the podium.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.